Big Sex Little Death

A Memoir

(Seal Press; 324 pages; $24.95)

Before getting started, let me confess: I am the last person who should be reviewing Susie Bright's new memoir, "Big Sex Little Death." I'm from New England. Though we enjoy sex, New Englanders prefer not to talk about it. Embarrassingly, my Californian ex-girlfriend used to call me "the little Puritan." Susie Bright would be horrified. But even those who aren't erotic pioneers, never frequent sex shops and have only one partner at a time can learn from her.

In case you slept through the 1980s, Bright helped found On Our Backs, the first lesbian erotica magazine in the United States, published by and for women, which she edited from 1984 to 1991. Nowadays, she has a blog, an online radio magazine, contributes to Huffington Post and other publications, and continues to write and edit books on sex and sexuality. Though no longer called "Susie Sexpert," Bright has street cred, and then some: She even consulted on the deeply lesbionic feature film "Bound" (starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly as a hot butch-femme couple in trouble with the mob). In short, Bright is a local legend. And as she proves in her thoughtful, juicy, fast-paced and (of course) sexy memoir, she is a surprisingly good writer.

One might expect Bright to focus on the "feminist sex wars," the debates on sexuality and pornography that made her famous in the '80s and '90s. She gets there, but is reluctant to give it up too early.

Instead, two-thirds of the book covers Bright's family history, the complicated and painful relationship of her parents who divorced when she was 5, her unhappy childhood with an abusive and unstable mother, and her years as a teenage radical - politically and sexually - in the International Socialists. Before becoming Susie Sexpert, there were UPS drivers and Teamsters to organize; the book is full of blue-collar socialist dudes toting guns and quoting Lenin while bedding every woman in sight - our author in particular.

Luckily, Bright was kicked out of the Socialists (otherwise she still might be trying to convert long-haul truckers to socialism, never an easy task). Leaving the movement led her to college and, later, to a job at Good Vibrations, the feminist sex-toy store, and then On Our Backs. The rest is history: our queer history.

Once upon a time, certain feminists, including those involved in the publication Off Our Backs, believed that pornography hurt women or led to violence against women. Others, like Bright, found the Off Our Backs feminists prudish, old-fashioned and, gulp, puritanical. "Why did they make such a fuss?" wonders Bright, contemplating her feminist critics. "My best answer today is that they were guilty, fearful, competitive ... but utterly thwarted in their own attempts to live large. We were the last of the bohemians, in a nation dying of erotic illiteracy."

On Our Backs celebrated unapologetic lesbian lust, female eroticism, woman-created pornography, leather, fetishism - everything the old-school feminists feared. It sought to help women reclaim their sexuality: women who are frequently victims of sexual abuse and are not always given positive messages about their erotic lives.

For those expecting a Sapphic garden of delights, I'm sorry to report that most of the book's graphic sex is, alas, of the boy-girl variety. Bright came out as bisexual as a teen, and though she went wildly lesbo in her 20s, producing dyke porn, at 32, she had a daughter and eventually settled down - with a man. Bright unexpectedly took to motherhood, healing the abuse she suffered from her mother. Mothering, she writes, "was like the balm that makes the burn go away. I turned out to have a thing for wearing aprons and kissing tears away." Who knew?

Was Bright's On Our Backs radical super-dyke era simply a phase, like Picasso's blue period? To be fair, the section describing her difficult decision to quit the magazine is perhaps the most moving: Facing the impossibility of caring for her creative offspring and her real one, she chooses her daughter.

Among other things, "Big Sex Little Death" is about the painful process of growing up and letting go. (For the uninitiated, the French phrase la petite mort, the little death, is a metaphor for orgasm.) Bright writes touchingly of death and loss; at the risk of sacrilege, it might have deepened the book to have more death and a little less sex.

One can't help being just a tad envious of Bright. Forget the fact that in a lifetime of bliss, she's probably gotten more than you, me or most of your friends combined, even if she claims otherwise. I would settle for her brain cells; in midlife, she has fantastic, detailed recall of sexual encounters from 35 years ago. I wish my memory functioned at that level of granularity.

In her introduction, Bright says that for a woman to write a serious memoir is an act of chutzpah. So many women's memoirs are about struggles with food, body image or addiction. This one is an honest look at a life dedicated to social justice, to hilarity, to living somewhere outside the mainstream, to sexual adventure. Read it, and then grab your squeeze for a celebratory roll in the hay. Susie would be proud.